Living As a Moon

by Owen Marshall

Being a drunk has exacerbated this tendency I know: there are things of mammoth incongruity that are nevertheless indisputable, and happenings that seem essential in my life, but have been proven illusory.

  Something of all this made me cautious when Eugene asked me for a contribution to our group discussion in the dining room. ‘And what about your parents, Malcolm?’ he said. ‘Were they positive and supportive people?’

  ‘They seemed to be always travelling,’ I said.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Eugene encouragingly, but I didn’t wish to say more, and Caroline began again about the sect her parents had belonged to in Wanganui.

  I wondered what my father and mother talked about during all those hours moving through the world together. Maybe they didn’t talk at all. Two disappointed people endlessly journeying in the Eden of a house truck, rather than admitting defeat.

  THE DON FERNANDO MOTELS

  It was Don’s idea, the name, copied not from literature, but from a trotter that he’d consistently backed in the late nineties and that had consistently won. And he’d been attracted to the horse not by lineage, or form, but because it bore his name. Men have this thing about the perpetuation and profile of their name. There was Don junior too, their son. He moved to Perth, and joined a boat-building firm. He said his father should have been in dairying rather than slogging on a hill farm, and that he’d have rather been christened Justin, or Ben.

  So when Don senior and Yvonne moved into the city, Don Fernando was the name he wanted for the beachside motels. The advice was to choose something beginning with A or B, so you were high in the order of the travel guide lists, but Don wouldn’t be swayed. You don’t give up on your luck, he said. Not when it was as rare a visitor as he found it perhaps.

  The Don Fernando motels had fourteen units arranged around three sides of a courtyard, with the fourth side open to the road, and then the dunes and marram grass before the beach. The Spanish theme was dutiful rather than convincing: pink stucco with murals of cacti, and the motel sign in the exaggerated shape of a Mexican sombrero. The plastic key tags were inscribed Hacienda 2, 3, and so on. The persistent afternoon easterly blew sand and detritus across the road and into the courtyard. On summer days the cars of surfers congested the sides of the road, and all year round at night cars nosed into the dunes — quietly if they contained courting couples, raucously if filled with a boozing group.

  The occupancy rate was a disappointment. Don had been keen on motels because of his handyman skills developed over decades of farming, but most of the work was cleaning, and dealing with people, and Yvonne did that. The thing was, Don said, that the council had given building consents open slather, when there weren’t the visitor numbers to justify it. He spent more and more of his time in Hacienda 1 watching sport on television, or tinkering with the faulty lint trap in the laundry room. Despite his interest in games, he developed an intense dislike for male sports teams as customers at Don Fernando. ‘May as well have pigs in,’ he’d say, as Yvonne cleaned up the vomit and scouted for the glasses. She knew they couldn’t afford to turn away anyone. She knew it was touch and go, because she did the books as well. Don Fernando was proving no El Dorado.

  Right from the start, Yvonne thought there was something odd about Digby R. Savant. A pseudonym like that was an arrogance in itself — on the one hand hiding your identity, on the other flaunting the disguise. He arrived in a taxi during the third day of a stint of persistent, drifting sea drizzle. He kept the taxi waiting while he established with Yvonne that she’d consider special rates for long stay. ‘A couple of weeks anyway, and then I’ll decide whether to stay on,’ he said. Well, in winter Yvonne wasn’t in a position to drive a hard bargain.

  Digby piled his gear in the small office, dismissed the taxi, and then began an inspection of the vacant units. There were eleven. Despite the soft drift of rain that settled on his babyish hair, he looked at each one, before choosing Hacienda 14, which was upstairs, closest to the road and overlooking the beach and the sea. ‘As much as possible I’d like unit 13 to be left empty,’ he told Yvonne. ‘It’s winter and I don’t imagine you’ll have that many bookings. I’ll be doing a good deal of work inside.’ Yvonne helped him take his gear up, and gave him a small bottle of blue top milk. ‘I’d like green top in future,’ he said, ‘and the larger one. I’m a bit of a white coffee freak when I’m working.’ Yvonne asked from politeness what his work was, and he said he did editing for academic journals. ‘Mainly palaeontology,’ he said, ‘but also physical geology.’ Yvonne didn’t believe a word of it, but wasn’t much interested either. He might stay some time, and he didn’t look the sort to trash a room: those were the important things to begin with.

  He did stay longer. When the two weeks were up he negotiated an even better deal for three months. Well, it was a relief just to have at least one unit earning every day, Yvonne told her husband. ‘Bit of a wanker, if you ask me,’ he said. Don didn’t take to him because although he was often making niggly requests, he wasn’t interested in having a decent talk about sport, or farming, or the deficiencies of the government. Yvonne went in twice a week to have a tidy. Digby set up his computer and associated gear on a card table that he borrowed from her. On the very few occasions he wasn’t in when she went, there was no evidence of his work on his table. Digby was secretive concerning his own affairs, but inquisitive about certain things pertaining to other people. He often asked Yvonne about folk passing through, sometimes he approached them directly in a surprisingly affable manner and chatted with them, which miffed Don all the more. Several times Yvonne saw him in the dark looking into the windows of other units. For some reason travelling folk pull the curtains less than they would in their own homes. And once she saw him over the road, crouched behind a Ford Mondeo, and listening to a group of young guys and women who had built a fire at the edge of the dunes.

  No visitors ever came to Hacienda 14, and Digby had no regular pattern of departure. When he did go out, it was almost always with a small, blue backpack. Yvonne met him a couple of times in the supermarket, and there were many cans in his rubbish bag when she emptied it. He was keen on pineapple, mashed corn and beans with small sausages. A couple of times when in adjoining units, she heard him talking: not so much a single flow, but as if he took both parts in some conversation. It was no business of hers. What was her business was ensuring he paid each week. Digby wanted to settle up at the end of his stay, but Yvonne was adamant. She made a good many concessions to Digby, compromises because of his long stay, but jibbed at that. Digby paid with little grace and always cash. He seemed to need to accompany the payment with some compensatory trivial complaint, or request. The laundry pipe had overflowed again, or could he have a Sunday paper delivered as well as the weekday one: the group in Hacienda 9 had kept him awake all night, or would Yvonne get the sand out of his coir doormat.

  Digby developed a special interest in Barbara, the postie. She said he never got any letters, but was often at the box when she came to Don Fernando, and must have been watching her progress from Hacienda 14. He asked a lot of personal questions, she told Yvonne. Things like how she spent her time when not working, and if she had a place of her own. Barbara had very attractive, well-muscled legs, but Digby wouldn’t have been aware of that in the winter, and she had separated from her husband because he made fun of her family and didn’t want children. Barbara had been a top netballer in her day, and wasn’t afraid of men. She said Digby was a bit weird — wanting to know stuff, but never asking her out, or saying much about himself. ‘I reckon he could do a flit if you don’t watch him,’ she told Yvonne at their Wednesday Pilates class. ‘What sort of a name is Digby Savant anyhow? You’d never see him again would you. Not even a car registration number.’

  ‘I’ve got him paying every week,’ said Yvonne. ‘Cash. He talks to himself inside the unit and eats mostly out of cans. He wouldn’t know a fresh vegetable.’

  ‘I don’t like his hair,’ said Barbara. ‘All bum fluff. And he’s so soft
looking, isn’t he? Hardly a muscle in his body, I reckon. He asked me the other day if I was interested in the occult, and I told him I didn’t want anything to do with cults. I hear about the things that happen to women there.’

  Digby Savant stayed the winter at the Don Fernando Motels, over four months in all. Only two people had stayed longer: a Wrightson’s manager and his wife on transfer who were waiting to move into a new house, and a German expert on port freight equipment who was advising the harbour board on its expansion plans. Digby left in a taxi, as he’d come, and with no discernible increase in his luggage. His last comment to Yvonne was that all the haciendas needed to have heat pumps installed. ‘What’s there is very drying on the skin,’ he said. He stood in the concrete courtyard, and the breeze agitated his longish, baby hair so that it danced on his forehead. ‘So I guess this is au revoir, sayonara and auf wiedersehen to the Don Fernando Motels then,’ he said, with false and exaggerated regret.

  The assured income was the only thing Yvonne and Don missed, and Barbara said she was glad to come on her round and not have Digby idling at the box. Months passed, and he’d been almost forgotten when Yvonne noticed an article in the features section of the Sunday paper. It was in the book pages, which she never bothered about, but the photograph caught her eye. It was Digby receiving the prestigious Mooncutter Literary Award and People’s Choice sash from the Minister for Arts and Culture. His novel, El Hernando Motel, was a runaway success for the hitherto unknown author. An auction was to be held for the film rights. The article exulted in what it termed a grim exposure of the underbelly of New Zealand society and the ambivalent duality of contemporary societal attitudes. Subtle allegory and existentialist flourishes, it said. An excerpt was given in which Digby wrote of the filmy curtains in the upstairs motel unit flowing inward from the open window like ectoplasm, while the vast breakers sounded bell-like in the distance and the grey sand scuttled ominously across the road towards the buildings.

  It was their place, no doubt, Yvonne told Don. She bought the book the next day. It was about this famous author who comes to the El Hernando Motel suffering from writer’s block and the effects of a failed relationship. His curiosity in the world is awakened by the oddity of the proprietors and the passing faces of the caravanserai, and especially Sally, the postwoman, an ex-athlete whom he comes to befriend, and eventually love. Sally has become drawn into a satanic cult dominated by the charismatic bikie leader, Bennyboy, and the hero witnesses her violation and murder in the dunes while helpless to intervene. The climax comes when the grief-crazed writer confronts Bennyboy on the cliffs of Nugent Point, and after the two grapple violently against a sky seared by flashes of lightning, they both fall to their death on the rocks below.

  Don didn’t read the book, but when Yvonne told him the story, he was more despondent than usual. ‘He was pretty much a prick when he was here, and now he’s done for us. Who’s going to want to holiday here now? People will take it for gospel, won’t they?’ He was right about people soon recognising the setting, but Yvonne saw the advantage in that. Women have the ability to see more options than men.

  She changed the name of the motels from Don Fernando to El Hernando. The president of the provincial moteliers’ association said that Digby would sue, but Yvonne replied that what was sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander, and having taken so much of theirs that was true, he couldn’t complain about relinquishing a little of his fiction. She put up net curtains in all the haciendas, and let the sand accumulate somewhat at the motel entrance. At dusk one evening she and Don went over to the dunes, and he hammered a waratah into the ground of a small hollow near the surfers’ track, and Yvonne attached one of those cemetery arrangements of artificial flowers. She didn’t put a name, just a plastic postal code tag.

  Digby’s book was on the bestseller list for twenty-three weeks and published in eleven countries. The El Hernando Motel was almost always full, even in winter, and Yvonne charged double rates for Hacienda 14 because of the ambience. ‘Whatever that is,’ said Don. People often came just to gawk, and many went into the dunes to have their photographs taken by the waratah and flowers, and shed a tear or two. Yvonne kept copies of the novel in the office which she sold on commission for one of the locally owned bookstores.

  Newspaper and television journalists pestered Don and Yvonne to talk about their connection to the book, but they never did, and Digby wouldn’t confirm or deny their motel as the setting for his novel. And he never contacted them, never came back to the seaside there, never sent an anonymous cheque to Barbara, or apologised to Yvonne for the printer refill ink that soiled the carpet in Hacienda 14. Both had benefited, though, Digby through creating art by distorting life, and Yvonne by altering life to reflect art. Quite a satisfactory quid pro quo you might think.

  MICHAEL

  As long as I endeavoured to maintain the deception that I was a good person, I was never at ease. I feel more comfortable now that I admit a good many shortcomings. You must become more tolerant of yourself as you go on, otherwise regrets and guilt become incapacitating. Michael used to say that the trouble with me was I’d had things too easy for too long.

  He and I were such old friends that I can’t point to a specific origin. We went to the same primary school, maybe even the same kindergarten, though memory strains that far back. We swirled with our contemporaries — a shoal of sprats. The sprats gradually formed into coteries, one of which contained us both. Our friendship had its fluctuations over the years. It was strongest when we had need of each other, when occupation or proximity drew us together, when neither of us had an obsessive conviction, or ambition, when we were least focused on the women in our lives. We never lost our friendship entirely, however, and the longer it lasted the more life and incident we had in common, and the more natural it seemed. Close friends become like family, with whom courtesy may be disregarded without affection being questioned.

  Flattery was not one of Michael’s skills, or intentions. He was cynical and pessimistic by nature, also loyal and possessed of a sort of dogged courage. He was a tight arse as well, never more pleased than when paying less than his fellows. You didn’t put one over Michael, or if you did you didn’t repeat it.

  As adolescents we must have seemed an odd pairing to a casual observer. I found sport a bore, and Michael was senior champion in discus, shotput and javelin. But his success came not from dedication and a consuming interest, but natural physical advantage and a quick understanding of technique. He couldn’t be bothered with the training demands of team sports. From an early age he was very broad and strong — and intelligent. In the courtroom he was an intimidating figure: had he been poorly dressed and in the dock, rather than suited and counsel, he might have been termed hulking.

  In all the years before we went to university, I seldom went to his house. Michael preferred to come to mine, or we would meet in town, or at school. ‘Mum doesn’t keep well,’ he’d say. I realise now that what she suffered from, and so what the family suffered from, was the antipathy between herself and her husband. Maybe it’s not a terminal sickness, but it’s a debilitating one. I remember best a rare overnight stay when I was a sixth former and my parents travelled to Sydney for a wedding.

  Mrs Chute — pronounced shoot — worked as receptionist for an optician: Mr Chute was an engineer with the council. They’d known me for ever, but seemed rather surprised when I turned up for tea, and with a small duffel bag for the night, though they must have agreed to host me. When Mrs Chute talked, her husband looked at his plate with a reduced, disparaging smile, ready to change the subject as soon as she finished. When he spoke, Mrs Chute busied herself with small, distracting tasks, picking lint from her sleeve, touching the flowers in the centre vase, or reaching past her husband to gather plates. Sometimes a quick, exasperated laugh, when nothing but exasperation could account for it.

  There was never a suggestion of any physical violence, or even vindictiveness, and I suppose they assumed an agreed par
tnership was presented. Mr and Mrs Chute were rarely together, and that’s why I hadn’t noticed their predicament earlier. I can’t remember any other occasion when I was with Michael and both his parents. Perhaps I overstate the situation; maybe it wasn’t so much dislike they shared, as indifference. Whatever had drawn them to marriage had passed long ago, and they were stranded together, with Michael and his small sister, Penny: they were like strangers seated together on a long haul flight and barely maintaining civility.

  I offered to help with the dishes as my mother had instructed me, and, as Michael and I dried, his mother talked to us quite freely about the teachers at our school, some of whom she’d recently had discussions with at a parents’ evening. Mr Chute was watching television, but when we went through later, and Mrs Chute remained in the kitchen, he showed an equally friendly side in advising us on political questions quite outside our interest. Neither of them made any reference to each other then, or in all the years I knew them.

  I’ve realised since that their marriage wasn’t unique, but at the time I had only my own parents for comparison. Their relationship was one of gracious compromise, quiet affection and mutual support. The example set for me was so much better than that for Michael, but I didn’t profit by it.

  Michael married early and divorced early. I was best man, but never knew Frances well. He and I were living in different cities then, both working hard at our professions and seeing little of each other. Frances was a lawyer too, and I remember her as a dark, slender woman always coming, or going, rather than sitting down to talk. I never asked him what went wrong, and all he volunteered was the comment that he had colleagues at work and needed more than that at home. I consider that the two of us were close in the way men are: Michael was honest in what he said, but his nature wasn’t confessional at all. Guys don’t like to download emotionally: you can become a sort of hostage to personal revelation.